"Partenia is unusual within the spectrum of Italian pastoral drama for its moral austerity and its spiritual overtones; a strange, haunting work, it well exemplifies the new directions Italian literature was taking at this time under the influence of Counter-Reformation religious fervor, and provides a fascinating counterpoint to the better-known pastorals of Isabella Andreini, Maddalena Campiglia, and Mary Wroth. Lisa Sampson and Barbara Burgess-Van Aken’s superb introduction, the fruit of intensive archival research, contains much new information on Torelli and her literary and intellectual context in Parma, and expertly locates Partenia within the traditions of pastoral drama and of late-Renaissance Italian literature as a whole."
 

Virginia Cox, New York University